A society that imports her gods, has offered to live under the caprice of foreign pestilences. She has mortgaged her destiny to the insular enclaves of alien theologies. Her doctrines and dogma are overthrown by derivatives of alien thought patterns, rendered canonical by capricious and
absentee conclaves. In such a theatre, foreign metaphysics rises to displace
local values. Irreverent incoherence isolates
and devastates local cosmologies. Local mores are alienated to make way for the
import to march to supremacy. Such is the trajectory of the contact between an
occupying power and native reality. This inheres in the fact that conquering
powers are also epistemic imperialisms. For every conquest to be total, it must
principally devastate the mental universe of the conquered; making it an
ideological no-man’s land or tabula rasa, upon which the conqueror and its
agents proceed to rewrite or rewire the conceptual genetic blueprint of the
conquered, to suit the designs of empire. This is why every imperialism battles
to dethrone local conceptual schemes, usurp the role of local values in the
lives of the conquered; lording it over local pedestals of meaning and theories
of value, with all the inquisitorial decisiveness and totalitarian recklessness
that has underwritten every enterprise of imperialism.

If not, how can a society commission its own collapse? How can a society hand over its head on a platter to a conqueror because he asked for it? How can a people yield their gods to be decapitated or burnt at the conqueror’s fires simply because
the conqueror just showed up, knocked on the door and politely asked for that?
No society commissions its own self-destruction. Any society that ever
collapsed succumbed to some force or pressure. Those societies were conquered;
either from within or from without. They bow to the onslaught of one or more
complex set of factors. Most of them succumbed either to the conquest of
invincible ignorance; the arrogant over, or underestimation of its capabilities
and chances in the face of novel threats; or the overwhelming firepower of
conquerors guns, germs, treachery, or steel as Professor Jared Diamond tried to
articulate.

By conquering the native epistemic authority, the conqueror secures either their timid acquiescence in the face of their exploitation, or the collaboration of their ignorance in their own destruction. To that end, whenever imperialism
makes a landfall, it shocks and awes local sensibilities with the crude
violence it advertises, the superlative savagery it consults, and the ruthless
perfidy it deploys. It massacres opposition into submission. Treachery is the software of its transactions
in such instances. The ruthlessness of the violence shocks the recipients into
psychological immobility. It knocks their resistance cold. They are frozen in
awe of the new phenomenon. It assaults the citadels of local meaning. It rapes
local epistemologies, which have no response to this onslaught. It mocks the
local deities which neither anticipated such catastrophes, nor have responses
to them. This creates a social psycho-trauma that packs the destructive
equivalent of Giga-tons of Hiroshima-grade nuclear explosion. Many societies
cannot but succumb to this ruthless force or risk instant extinction. At this,
the conquering power then gains a foothold. With this foothold, the conquered
society is then ‘invited’ to cannibalise itself; pressurized into participation
in its own funeral; or genetically re-engineered into convoking its own self
destruction by installments.

One major reservoir of a culture’s epistemic authority is its language. And a culture is conquered when the conqueror succeeds in imposing its own language as the vehicle of meaning upon the conquered. At this, the accreted putrescence of
other climes rides roughshod infecting native conceptual flora; engendering
some toxic erosion of local meaning and significance. It is just a matter of
time before such societies end up importing every other thing; from the
pseudo-sublime to the most ridiculous rejects of the conqueror. This is a
normal trajectory. Since such a society has ‘chosen’ the pontificating
pronunciations of foreign epistemologies to interpret her values for her, she
has offered to see reality from the eyes of her conquerors. Everything the
conqueror canonizes, even if that piece of shit does not speak to local
realities; one usually sees the conquered falling over themselves to incarnate
it in their lives, and re-echo it in their circumstances. There have been cases
were the conquered even began loving their conqueror’s in a Stockholm syndrome
gone awry. Such slaveries are total. They last forever. Liberation from such
chains is almost impossible. This is because the conquest of a society’s
epistemology means a total control of its perceptual faculties, value system,
and sources of psycho-social legitimacy. Whatever would compel a society to
exile its own gods and assume that of its conquerors; keep silence at its own
plunder; participate in its decimation; help its own cannibalisation and
finance its own funeral; must engender some tsunamic bout of self-destruction,
before it can succeed. Ndiigbo of
Southern Nigeria has it that whatever can out-bite a dog has got quite some
teeth.

Whenever or wherever this is achieved, local gods are then coaxed to speak in foreign tongues. Alien ceremonies are convoked on hills where local ancestors, once poured libations to the memory of their forebears. Communion wafers are eaten
in temples built upon the demolished shrines of our spirits; where our
ancestors celebrated their kolanuts in commensality and brotherhood, with the
gods of our land in attendance. Wines pressed off European grapes solemnly
displace the nourishing and ritual potencies of the fruits of our palms. As temperate wines displaced tropical gins,
our Earth Mother was denied her due libations. Not only that we could not offer
sacrifices to our ancestors due to the indisposition of our chained spirits,
the imported deities and their armed convoy of mercenaries, in time, rose to
criminalize even our thinking about the august memory of our forebears. We were
forbidden even to sit down by our own tropical equivalents of the Rivers of
Babylon to weep over our lost innocence. There was no funeral to propitiate our
pain. We were not even allowed the luxury of mourning. We are even compelled to
forget our mother-tongues, without our tongues cleaving to the roofs of our
mouth. The earth housing our umbilical cords in its bosom was desecrated. The buccaneers conscripted by foreign realms
mocked us as the guardians of our land lay in their conquered state. Our earth
was cosmic in her anger. She craved libation to appease her. Since the
conquerors could not bring themselves to offer Her ‘Nkwu enu’*, they resorted
to water-boarding her with the blood of her sons and daughters as an abominable
libation, which she tearfully swallows; not to nourish herself, but to deny
abomination a place in the sun, and spare the elements the pain of that
desecration.

Africa is now a society of imported gods!!!!

This explains not only the massive violence with which foreign gods implanted their feet on our firmament; and with which they sustain their precarious hold on the minds and bodies of our people, but also the ease with which we tend to all
things foreign as if to say that foreign is synonymous with good.

The soul of the African is now a battlefield for competing epistemologies; a casino for the rogue gambling of foreign nonsense. And we are paying for it in the blood of our people, massacred at the altars of rogue ideologies, to assuage the tenets
of foreign dogmas. We are paying for it in the heritage of cognitive dissonance
and inferiority complex that dog our individual and collective existence. We
are equally paying for it in the destruction of millennium old heritages of our
culture and civilization. We are also paying for it in the proliferation of
various dysfunctional ideologies, arising out of the crosspollination of
various tenets of defunct cultures, which we grant relevance in our lives, and
which has continued to weigh down our march to true independence. We are paying
for it in the eternal disharmony between our realities and the foreign ideas we
profess as valid, even in a continent where many of them will never gain
relevance due to the toxicity of these species to the local soil.

This recurring decimal of violence plaguing the relationship between various imported dogmas all over Africa is testament to the fact that the pantheons of our ancestors have been demolished. Our gods were forced into exiles. The
deities that sanctioned our consanguinity seemed to have been conquered by the
same forces that conquered our lands. We became estranged from our roots, and
our most intimate acquaintances. Our brothers in this new conceptual scheme
metamorphosed into games for our sport; commodities for our exploitation; and
enemies to be massacred at will, because they fly the banners of a dissimilar,
imported ideology. The Christian-Muslim conflict that paralyzed Jos, Plateau
State a few days ago; and many other such explosions in other parts of Africa,
are simply footnotes in this long history of violence that Africans were
conscripted to inflict on each other, on behalf of foreign doctrines.

2. Egbe eburu Mbe!! (The Kite has Devoured the Tortoise)

The hawk can devour the chicken for breakfast. Nature ordains that. But nature must have definitely gone rogue, for a kite, instead of grabbing a chick for its meal, carries off the tortoise. It is symptomatic of uwa mmebi-nature gone rogue! The
natural equilibrium of things is disrupted when nature goes rogue. The elements are not in harmony anymore. They
run haywire. The gods are angry. The things that were not normal, graduate to
daily occurrence. It is in contexts like this that abominations become
tradition.

As Africa fell apart at the advancing pestilence of Arabian and European colonial incursions, African gods were sacked and exiled from their abodes. Some of them are now resting as lifeless relics of a primitive past in some European Museum.
Our ancestors and living Deads were forced into secretly drinking libations of
imported whisky, in cases where they are lucky to get some. In most cases, they
were banished to drinking from whichever corrupted stream they could lay their
tongues on, or risk an existence characterized by dry throats.

They had no choice since our good old palmwine was dismissed by foreign forces as an instrument of paganism. In this melee, the Ikenga was thrown overboard. Many of them were abandoned, broken, and supplanted with foreign statues, in
homesteads, where they held sway before the pestilence. They were broken by
their sons, at the nudging of visitors they welcomed with open arms. Insults
were heaped upon injuries as their sons became intimate bed mates of the
conquering ideologies. To that end, they took to hovering around their former
homesteads as strangers would. They were forced into doing the round of Ofekes.
Their sons and daughters abandoned them for the Whiteman’s religion. Our feasts
and festivals were abandoned as the hangovers of primitive infancy. Our chants
and incantations were labelled pagan. Our shrines were left unkempt and allowed
to be run over by wild bushes. There was no one in attendance any more at our
shrines, groves, and feasts. The Eze muo(s) and Ezeulu(s) were abandoned by the
people. The sons of the Eze muo(s) and Ezeulu (s) entered seminaries to become
catholic priests. That compromised the future of the Eze muo tradition. Our
sacred forests which testified to the ecological foresight of our ancestors lost
the battle for relevance to the bugs of bulldozing greed, which preferred
concrete blocks to an integral environment. Soil erosion, floods and hitherto
unknown climatic phenomenon, all rose to attack our ecological apostasy. We
chose the conqueror’s system of government, although it never spoke to our
reality. We adopted it although it was fundamentally ignorant of our history.
And we practise and are still clinging to it, although it has corrupted our
will, destroyed our land and bequeathed us a legacy of mal-development. It was
the supreme apostasy. In the fullness of time, we all rose in unison to
genuflect subserviently and bow our heads at the altars of foreign gods.

Europe and Arabia conquered not only African lands. They seemed to have conquered the wisdom of our “Chi”** as well; bequeathing us the bloodthirsty fooleries accumulated by these religions in the course of their various histories.
Instead of African deities like Agbala*** inhabiting our caves to guard our
lands, we were mentally re-engineered into rejecting and displacing Agbala and
her ilk, with the tenets of some borrowed faiths. We even captured the potent
symbols of our deities and sold them to the Whiteman. Instead of our sacred
forests and shrines, our deities are now displayed naked, to be mocked and
admired by the uncircumcised eyes of foreigners, in profane exhibitions at the
British Museum or the Vatican archives. Deities like ‘Ikenga’ that bade us
purchase our manhood with the currency of honourable deeds, were overthrown by
irrationalities like the suicidal cowardice that seeks sex in a paradise of 72
virgins, when we must have finished killing off all those who disagree with the
irrationalities we peddle as religion in Allah’s name.

Be that as it may, contemporary events have shown that Africa bowed to the power emanating from the conquerors guns, and not to the logic of their theologies. Till date, no one has been able to convince Okonkwo and the host of other elders gathered
in the village square on that day pictured in Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, of
the illogicality of the story that God could have a son without a mother. That
and many other such dogmas remain constructively illogical to us is never in
doubt. But we are asked to believe and propagate them, because they are dogmas!
–namely: some truths revealed by God, but transcending human comprehension.
Remember, they are still trying to explain it to us. I wonder how a reasonable
person would spend his time trying to explain what purportedly transcends human
understanding to us. Has he understood it? If yes, what does that make of the
“transcending human understanding part”?

3. We Question because we bear the Scars!!!!

Descartes started his revolutionary philosophy with a query. He queried the basis of reality. He did this by querying the apparatus of our knowledge. He questioned our epistemic facilities. He questioned our perceptual faculties. In one swoop,
he turned the epistemological basis of metaphysics on its head. How do we know
what we know? He arrived at Cogito. He thinks! That he thinks suffices for him
to explain his existence. He thinks, and for him to think presupposes that he
exists. He thinks, therefore he is. I think, therefore I am. Cogito ergo sum.

Descartes in spite of his other philosophical, scientific and literary achievements, gained admittance into our most august memories as cogito ergo sum! With that, he was fossilized in the minds of modern man. Descartes was a great. Why would
he question reality and existence? He could do that not only because he could
think, but because he is a part of reality and existence.

Africans have been questioning their predicament because they have been a part of that predicament, both as victims and sometimes as perpetrators of actions that consolidates the predicament. We
question because our frame bears the scars of our predicament. African sons and
daughters have been asking where this rain started to beat us. This is a word
in that long strain of questioning. The queries gain more relevance today due
to the insistence of our predicament.

Today after years of allegiance to imported deities, the jury is out. We are not developing. We have not attained the utopia that was promised us by these deities. Rather, we have been sucked into a vortex of imperial ruthlessness,
where we are used and abused for the amusement of other parts of the world,
both by internal and external exploiters. Uhuru has eluded Africa. Alien
religions did not bring down their heavens upon our earth. It rather bloodied
our earth with the blood of our relatives. Foreign creeds did not cure our
petty thievries. It rather gave us tools to elevate them to the ontological
level. Instead of giving us a good life for all, it rather taught us to become
robber barons in the name of good economics. It neither banished the human
propensity in us to covet; it rather sanctified our covetousness with the holy
waters of cant. Instead of stealing to feed our hungry stomachs, we can now
steal to feed our avarice. Where Igbo philosophy of man counseled “onye aghana
Nwanne ya”, imported ideologies canonized greed the basis of good economics. It
compelled us to dismantle our social ties to feed individual greed for profits.
Where our social anthropology counseled “Egbe belu ugo belu”, imported
ideologies countered “rout the competition”.

And the results are there for all to see! The scars are scandalous!

We were co-opted in the sale and marketing of our brothers. We were compelled at gunpoint, into trading our future in the unfairest of terms. Africa was depopulated to make Europe and Americas flow with wealth. The crème la crème of Africa’s
posterity was eviscerated. The bridge between the past and the future was
torpedoed. The youth that learnt from the elders to hand over to the unborn
were forcefully taken across the great ocean; never to come back again. Never
to ever fulfill their evolutionary function. With that evaporated
millennia-worth of knowledge and experience. Lost forever and never to be
regained again. Our homesteads were deprived of defenders. The youths who
filled in this role disappeared as if the earth opened up to swallow them. Ours
became a society of the old and the infants. That trade decisively changed
Africa’s nature, culture, and future. With the slave trade, we allowed and
participated in the celebration of a historical atrocity on our soil. We, as a
society was conscripted in the sale of our brothers to profit foreigners, as
many of us have continued to do till this day. The wailings of our sold
brothers and sisters continues to suffuse our ancestors with supplications
mourning our stolen heritage. Their backs were broken by drudgery. Their
humanity was ripped off them. Many of them were fed to the fishes. Many never
got the dignity of a funeral. Many of them died in their chains.

When the industrial revolution rendered slavery unprofitable to their greed, they came for the products of our land. We were forced to sell our commodities at their price. Some of our littoral regions became the Oil Rivers. That name was
instructive. We yielded our products to oil foreign economies and the pockets
of their robbery gangs, christened traders. We learnt the trade and decided to
control our resources. The imperialist grew livid at our quick realization that
we could turn the tables to our advantage. Their artilleries were trained at
our habitation to lay it to waste. We succumbed to a military invasion designed
to control our trade routes. They sacked our kings and exiled our chiefs. Jaja
Opobo died in exile. Ovaremwhen Nogbaisi was forced to swallow the defeat of
the stool of his fathers. Then the Whiteman took over our government. He hired
those at the periphery of our societies and ordained chiefs over us, by his
fiat. Colonialism planted its foot firmly on our soil. We left the ways that gave
us food without poisoning our environment, polluting our waters, or depleting
our soils. We were brought into using chemicals to grow our food and poison our
bodies. They brought us diseases we never knew. Instead of cultivating our land
to grow our food, we were compelled to cultivate our land to feed foreign
industries.

Our motherland still bears the impress of this beast. We are now speaking the language of those who raped us. We were compelled to bury our mother tongues as unprogressive vestiges of inferiority in order to sound modern. At that, we
surrendered meaning to what the alien conclaves canonized as such, although
local reality kept on exploding our stupidity in this regard. In time we were
reduced to murdering our beautiful dialects with dysfunctional embroideries of
foreign citadels of meaning.

As all these settled on our embrace, we started believing the view, which defined us

as modern and developed, to the extent that we are able to successfully ape the ways and pretensions of the conqueror.

With this dissonance, we internalized the manufactured narrative of inferiority peddled about us. We started arranging and conducting our lives on other people’s terms. As we scrambled to come to terms with the shock that has rearranged the
tectonic plates of our society, the next shock loomed on the horizon. We were
thrown into a dangerous dilemma, and forced to take a stand. Either we define
or allow ourselves to be defined according to the canons of this narrative, or
we spend our time vehemently rejecting the image of us constructed in this
narrative. Either way, we are forced to a reactionary position. It is a
dangerous position. Here we can never win, no matter how hard we try. History
is a weapon. Whoever tells your story has the keys to your destiny. He can
deploy that story to the ends and aims of his choosing. We ran the risk of
being conjugated in foreign verbs by narrators, who pontificates over our
history to direct our destiny. Or we resist their badges and create our own.
Our attempts to create our own were immediately dismissed as heretical
dissimulations of victimological nature. The microphone was pried off our hands
before we can even announce our names. Our voices and literatures become
banished to be read in the dark basements of leftist radicals.

It was a Machiavellian gambit. Imperialism knew that the more time we spend trying to define ourselves or defend ourselves from the definitions peddled about us, the more we lose sight of the big picture. Imperialism subsists on the oppressed losing
sight of the big picture. For any imperialistic enterprise to be successful,
the target audience must be kept busy pursuing rodents. This keeps them amply
busy, while the rogue power delivers the viral software that brainwashes them
into believing that it is in their best interest to serve the rogue willingly
and religiously.

(Please Continue Bellow)

The conqueror put a knife to cut all that held us together. Our society was tornapart. Our beings became a warfront for conflicting allegiances. Thisdissonance opened the gates for poverty to invade our experience. Atavisticcompetition that hallowed individual greed above the common good rose toimpious prominence. We joined the orchestra of greed. We learned the philosophyof destruction. To prove our proficiency, we started singing symphonies ofexploitation. With poverty, we condemned many of our kind to crime. Ourresources could no more finance our existences. We were marched like herds ofgoats into urban pens, to rip open the bowels of our earth, so that theconqueror would have coal to drive his industries and war machines. We wereconfigured into yielding our labors and resources to service foreign economies.We were rewired and re-tooled into abandoning our needs and aspirations todevote our lives and entire existences to servicing the conqueror needs. Nonewas left for our lives. We called it modernity and civilization. In time westarted competing for the most basics of necessaries. Competition invited ajungle. Before we knew what was happening African children were marched off towar; pumped full with drugs and ordered to rape their mothers, cut off theirfather’s genitals, chop off their brothers’ hands and feet, and shoot theirmost intimate acquaintances in a surreal theatre of oedipal perversity: all indefense and/defiance of geopolitical monstrosities bequeathed to us by Europeas states and nations. Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Uganda, all played hosts tothis dimension of bestiality. Our country-sides were turned into murderousbattlefields, where we kill each other in the name of our various gods. Jos,Nigeria is one such theatre. African politicians are empowered by the importedcant known as western version of democracy into going up to the capital cities,which ape imperial power centers, to steal legally from the commonwealth, inservice to their individual greed. There, they go to execute and crucify theAfrican principle of community, which counseled that the individual existsbecause his community exists.

The list is so long as to defy enumeration!

4. The Neutrality of Ideologies?

Importation of theologies or ideologies is neither positive nor negative in itself. Afterall, every theology is an agglomeration of borrowed myths and contrivedprojections. Some are fractionally distilled legends echoing subconsciouswishes of the human heart. Others are primitive needs and will to powerelevated to the ontological level. But be that as it may, each of these mustacquit itself positively if it is to assume some relevance in its new abode. Itmust conduce to the use designed and intended for it by its importers. If not,it would be jettisoned in time. Human experience has shown that culture isdynamic. Cultures borrow and lend to each other across time and space. Theyimport and export some of their pedestals as contact with others increases. Tothis end, some have arisen to define civilization as culture at an exportlevel

I have personal reservations at this definition.

Epistemic Imperialisms and cultures of nihilistic savagery have been exported acrosscultural lines over time. Besides the fact that my philosophic vocation wouldnever permit an unexamined acceptance of any definition that offers itself upfor consideration; I wonder if I would accept that as civilization, without anyqualification. I eternally refuse toaccept the slaughtering of the Mesoamericans into extinction by the rampagingavarice of a buccaneering Europe, as a civilizing mission. If I am to acceptthat, what would I in justice, tell the Sapa Inca and his Inca people of Peru andSouth American Andes? Should I tell them to accept their massacre in goodfaith, as that is the price of civilization? How could I ever justify theplundering, dismembering; the physical and mental enslavement of generations ofAfricans? Is it civilization that African humanity was packed in the putridholds of ships; in chains that reeks with inhumanity, and sold off as articles,to masters who would rape their labours, their genitals and their humanity?

Could anyone be justified in labelling that civilization?

I forever refuse to utter or invoke the names of Pizzaro, Cortes, Columbus, FrancisDrake, James Cook and other arrant pirates of expired European Empires with anyreverence in my breath, no matter what the doctored historical books pretend totell. Justice and the deities guarding her portals forever hold that the ghostsof megalomaniac rapists like Leopold II, the butcher of the Congo would neverrest in any sanctuary of good odour. If Leopold II and other such imperialsadists are not manifestations of savagery, why the pyramid of chopped handsharvested at his orders in the Congo? Is this guy, and every other such knave,not the perfect proof of the obverse of what civilization should be? On thecontemporary front, I wonder if I would ever accept the fraudulent falsehoodspeddled by Washington under George W. Bush, and Whitehall under Tony Blair toexplain away their bowing to the rapacious covetousness of their elitistconstituencies for Iraqi Oil, as an operation to give Iraq the gift of democracy.If all these could be accused of being civilizing missions, then we mustelevate Adolf Hitler to the sainthood. We should then apologise to the Nazihenchmen executed at Nuremberg. We should beatify the psychotic tyranny ofJosef Stalin and all other scoundrels of history.

5. Signature of Epistemic Pathology

I was aroused to consider our experience with our imported ghosts due to what hasbecome a consistent festival of socio-cultural disharmony in the interactionbetween local realities and the constructs we inherited from elsewhere in therecent past. We can confidently say that Africa is now at a great crossroads.Our imported constructs have refused to mix well with our local realities andexperience. Imported experiences have continued to settle like oil atop thewaters of our indigenous reality and social experience. They have not mixedwell. The cognitive dissonance engendered by this situation on the sources ofour social legitimacy and epistemic authorities in Africa have been very grave.

Very clear instances of this could be seen in almost all facets of our lives. It could beseen in the way we practice our borrowed faiths; the way we practice ourborrowed democracy; the way we practice our borrowed ways of life. TheChristian religion for instance, enjoys patronage on Sundays and attracts hugefollowership, at least nominally across our land. But the Babalawos; theEzemuo(s); the guardians of our abandoned gods, equally enjoy a business boom.The two pedestals are supposed to be mutually exclusive. But in Africa, onedoes not exclude the other. We mix the worst tenets and dimensions of themtogether and the dissonance continues. Another proof of this chaotic and toxicbrew emanating from the mixture of these two worlds can be seen in the life ofa typical Nigerian car owner or the average driver on the Nigerian road. Manydrivers sitting behind the wheels of many cars in Nigeria on any given daynever had any formal driving school experience. Many of them don’t even knowhow to drive, except moving a car from A to B; whatever happens in-between isnot their business. Yet, their first port of call on buying a car, is not tothe driving school to get some driving lessons, but to pastors, priests andother henchmen and women of God or Satan as their inclinations dictate, to havethe vehicles blessed, or evils cast and bound off the cars, so that they wouldalways arrive at their destinations safely, even though they don’t know how todrive.

If we accuse the conquerors of conceptually colonizing us, what do we make of theconsistent attempts of our compatriots to massacre meaning at the altars ofignorance? What do we make of those whose delight is in imposing ignorance uponthe gullible? In which category should we classify those, who canonize theirrationality of their private neuroses, as pious declarations of the Christianfaith? If you think this is a metaphor, then you have not encountered theaverage Nigerian pastor of a “mushroom church”. They have names like HelenUkpabio, Emeka Ezeugo King. These guys are traders and marketers of massignorance. Many catholic and Anglican priests have become vanguards of thischarlatanism. Some of them have tapped into this huge reservoir of superstitionthat the African mind is susceptible to; to wreck inestimable havoc on ourposterity.

The greatest crime that these insanities on religious steroids are committing islabeling our children as witches. In the Cross Rivers region of Nigeria, onecrazed psychotic declared that we have over 400,000 witches and wizards in AkwaIbom State. These charlatans commission a heartless assault on childhood. Theymarket sorcery and stigmatize our posterity as witches, thereby handing theirignorant relatives the blank cheque to murder innocence.

Europe hunted women and children down for centuries as witches. Humanity wallowed inthis dark recidivist grotto until renaissance came with its enlightenments. Werealized the superstitious base of such exorbitant ignorance dressed in theexquisite robes of false spirituality. Before that, millions of men, women, andchildren have been massacred. Today, these religious henchmen and henchwomen;ignorant scoundrels who are allergic to common sense and the lessons ofhistory, have created a religious abattoir where the psychosocial well being ofNigerian childhood is slaughtered. Withthis Awka Ibom State in Nigeria, and every other such places on our continenthave nominated themselves the cemeteries of childhood.

These are signatures of some deep, epistemic pathology that inspires behaviour and actionacross a broad spectrum of the African population. This is rightly identifiedbecause every religion or ideology comes armed with an epistemology. Everyimported god comes with its own baggage. Why wouldn’t that be the case, wheneven the most materialistic expression of empiricism is capable of constructinga metaphysics. This is very simple to see in the daily lives of Africansocieties of contemporary times, as our example above shows. But suffice it tosay that such arrant importations of foreign gods, to wear the garbs of ourabandoned gods, never bid us refine our iniquitous propensities. History hasshown that it rather seems to brew a toxic mix of superstition superimposed andhawked upon a veneer of sciento-technical rationality at best. Or at worst, itessays to displace local value system totally, and imbue the adherents of thenew gods with such an epistemic arrogance of absolute proportions; a dogmaticbigotry that is superlatively impervious and allergic to reason; a murderoushatred of contrary viewpoints; and an impulsive readiness to murder opponentson their gods’ behalf. In such contexts, we are not urged to change ourcannibalisms, but are better equipped with new conceptual tools to elevate theman ontological notch higher. We are now better equipped to commit ourcannibalisms with cutleries instead of the good old fingers. Instead ofcommitting murders in petty forms, we now commit mass murders with betterweapons, and better PR managers to ensure an invite for peace talks from theUN.

The list runs through the roof.

The only difference between our old situation and our new status is that we are nowarmed with a more refined repertoire of hypocrisy to deploy with a clearconscience, whenever we are sinning to our hearts’ content. We are now predisposedto consult these dispositions that are at variance with reason; whileadvertising our creeds as peaceful. And we do this most solemnly, with the mostconvulsive and the most obscene version of hypocrisy that is accessible tohuman stupidity.

This explains why a Christian would steal, rape, plunder lands, exploit peoples, abusechildren, and barbecue opponents in bonfires; all in Jesus name. It alsounderwrites many a Muslim, murdering opponents of his faith while screamingAllahu Alkbar. It confects a justification for many a Jewish agent, putting abullet in the head of an enemy of Israel while chanting the Shamma Yisrael.This equally explains why religious history has been a pornography ofbloodletting. Muslims and Christians have been slaughtering each other andother lesser mortals in their vicinity since both religious attained power andinstitutionalisatio n. With hindsight we can say that Achebe’s Okonkwo wasright in fighting the marauding bearers of foreign gods that invaded his land.These imported gods seem most times incapable of exorcising us of our worstnatures. As many an Islamic terrorist dreamt of sex orgies involving 72 virginsin a paradise, where I doubt they would have need for their penises; as rewardfor blowing off the heads of innocent men, women and children; Mahatma Ghandiwas forced by Christian behaviour into confessing his love of Christ, butdisdain of Christians, since his observations taught him that being Christianseems to mean being unlike Christ in all things.

If the cryptic desire to express their repressed sexualities in a heaven of 72 virginsis their only motivation for murder, these guys would have long revised theirpretensions. Swing clubs are everywhere on earth to cater to their repressedneurosis. Prostitution happens to be the oldest vocation in history. They knewthat they need not murder to gain admittance to a heavenly swing club. Some fewdollars or Euros could buy one that pleasure here on earth. But that is not theonly motivation. Foreign gods have a knack for blood also

6. Foreign Gods also Drink Blood!

Truth is reality staring at us in its nakedness. She stands on the integrity of her ownmajesty. Truth needs no violence to peddle her. The audacity of truth isunbearable to false hearts. That is why truth calls for courage to express her.But she needs neither armies nor warriors to peddle or defend her. Inversely,truth requires extraordinary violence to suppress her. But falsehood requiresforce and the arms of might to peddle her unto acceptance. The unreasonablenessof an idea is most times directly proportional to the violence it requires forits defense. This is to say that the more unreasonable an idea is, the moreviolence it requires to peddle it.

Thousands of Africans have been slaughtered; offered as unwilling holocausts at thebloodthirsty altars of imported gods. More Nigerians have been killed in theconflict between Christians and Muslims in recent times, than any othersingular factor. Every religion sacralizes blood, both actually andmetaphorically. But religions with Abrahamic roots seem to be in love withblood.

Not that the same could not be said of many other religions, but its Abrahamic manifestationunderwrote and has had more influence in the history of the major imperialenterprises in history, whose heritage we have been forced to share. The Bible;a resource drawn upon by Jews, Christians, and Muslim was a documented odysseyin bloodletting, culminating in the Christian God taking his son to theMountains of Skull to have him villainously executed, for what Christiansconstrue as a cosmic redemption of mankind. Although this has been anotherstrain of the perennially recycled myth, which can be traced back to theancient Egyptian god Horus, Jesus the Christ went a step further to elevatelove of neighbour, forgiveness, and turning the other cheek, as thecentrepieces of his faith. But Christian history has been anything but aboutturning the other cheek or love of neighbour.

Prior to that drama at Golgotha, Abraham, the father claimed by Jews, Christians andMuslims as the Patriarch of their faiths; in a brutal renunciation of all thenatural affiliations commanded by consanguinity, took his son Isaac; his onlyson, to the plains of Moriah; just like Okonkwo of Achebe’s Things Fall Apart,did the son of his house, Ikemefuna; and there to murder this son of his loins,who calls him father. All because his God decreed it!!!

This may have been where Christians and Muslims of Jos Plateau State borrowed theirideology, of pouring libations with the blood of their fellows, at the altarsof these imported gods. If my God who is an absolute value for me, could ask meto renounce my nature; relieve myself of responsibilities of the most intimatebonds of relationship imposed on me by consanguinity; and murder my child forthe sake of paradise or to prove my faith; then there are no more restraintsholding me back from massacring my neighbour with reckless abandon in the nameof my faith or paradise; no matter how neurotic that sounds to rationalsensibilities.

Where African gods made do with the bloods of chickens and goats, the importedDeities demand our hearts, our wallets and our blood. Since Islam andChristianity came to Africa, we have witnessed the good, the bad and the ugly.The good have been many. But the bad have been many as well. On the bad side ofthe ledger, we have been converted into an extended theatre of nihilisticsavagery that has characterized the history of both religions from the MiddleEast through Europe and Arabia respectively. Nigeria for instance, has becomethe new frontier in the war of one religious ideology over the other.

On the Christian side, we inherited a Christianity armed with over six centuries ofexperience in murdering its opponents, repression of opposition, epistemictyranny, crusading, fighting for pieces of choice real estates and gettingempires and kings to do their killings for them; spying and torture. It was aChristianity compromised by its schisms and political splits betweenAnglicanism and Catholicism and their various splinter pockets. This history isequally one, which saw Protestant England and Catholic Northern Irelandmurdering each other for God and country over the course of centuries, even tothe thresholds of contemporary times. Europe was Christian during the longestperiod of the celebration of savagery, ever seen by human history known as the30 year war. It was the Christian Church that bequeathed history theabomination of the Inquisition. Islam is not any better. Islam came with atwelve century old heritage of murder and massacre of those the Koranidentified as infidels. Islamic jihads killed millions over 12 centuries.

The cycle of violence at the instance of religion in Africa has been so nauseating thatit seems, that every African should now abandon these foreign gods and go backto the gods and goddesses of our fathers. Our fathers’ gods were not gods withimperial pretensions. They had no room in their various Theodicies forcategorization of peoples into infidels and believers. Freedom of thought andconscience is the hallmark of their various amphitheatres. They are potent godsthat fought for themselves. They never needed the arms of flesh to fight theircauses. Yet they were deemed powerless. But they were wiser than the Christianand Islamic gods, who required their followers to fight for them. African godswere thunderous whenever they rise to do battle with their adversaries. Theywipe out the families and homesteads of those who committed abomination. Theydon’t have a problem with those who disagree with them. The pantheons ofAfrican gods are democratic and never imperial. That explains why an Africancan worship so many gods at the same time, without any of them being jealous ofthe size of sacrificial piece of meat the other one gets. But since Africansembraced the religion of the one who called himself a jealous God; they havebeen at the forefront of being so murderously jealous on their god’s behalf andmurdering their brothers pursuant to that insanity.

7. Mercenaries of God

Our ancestors never needed the dogmas of Vatican or the Fatwahs of Mecca to tellthem what is good and what the obverse is. Today, our noveaux religieux aresimply satellites of the Vatican and Mecca, or other such power centres thatdictate on doctrine and dogma. Time was when Vatican told the world “ExtramEcclessiam, Nulla Salus est”- Salvation could not be had outside the Church. Iwonder which salvation that meant. That was conceptual imperialism at itsfinest. Centuries of Christians believed that papal nonsense.

The renaissance in spite of the impeding conservatism of the Church happened. Itgradually eroded the basis of ecclesial authority. The church sought to hold itself in balance.It fought losing battles with the new epistemic authority availed humanity byscience. It was not until an aggiornamento happened that the church reallyconsidered some of the impious nonsense it peddled in the past. John XXIII was compelled by moderncircumstances to ventilate the stuffy entrails of the church. He opened thewindow. He let in some fresh air. It was at this time that the Christian churchsearched for voices within her ranks, which would have been condemned to slowbonfire by the Inquisition, were they born a century earlier, did she try to salvagea little credibility.

To offset the faux pas of the Extram Ecclesiam assertion without losing face, the Churchborrowed heavily from one of her sons. Karl Rahner was a brilliant Austriantheology professor, who believed in the church and her salvific mission. It washe who reworked that assertion with all its theological implications. Hebelieved the assertion that salvation could not be had outside the church. Buttook it a step further to account for the fate of all those who foundthemselves outside the Catholic Church and millions of other who would nevercome into that faith. He then extended the definition of the Church. Heextended it to include everybody, whether baptised or not. The only ticket nowfor admittance, unlike in the past definition, is that this person must do goodaccording to the dictates of his conscience, even if he had never heard thename of Christ. He comprehensively baptised everyone a Christian, even thosewho were born before Christ came. He called them “anonymous Christians”. (LumenGentium 14-16) That signified the church’s readiness to moderate that stand.The Lumen Gentium, the Second Vatican Council Dogmatic Constitution on theChurch, gave an apostolic blessing to that modification.

The former stand is akin to the baloney sold by Muslims that only Muslims will be inparadise. In this purview, which is a licence for conversion or murder, one isallowed either to become a Muslim, risk a second class status or face the swordof the believer.

The Christian Church has been a great conceptual and cultural imperialist, thanksto the amorphous nature of its message. This message has the ability ofutilizing the vehicles of other cultures to propagate its own. This is what hasensured its survival across time and across various cultures.

Time was when the church needed to go against opposition of learned men, who were busydeploying the intellectual resources and patrimonies of the ancient world intheir apologetics against faith. The “heretics” quoted Aristotle and Plato toback up their assertions. Instead of yielding ground to these voices ofdiscontent, the Church rose up to baptise those strains of Aristotle and Platothat conduced to her message and mission, thereby cutting the ground off thefeet of the dissenters. Thomas Aquinas took Aristotle to the baptismal font,while Augustine dragged Plato there.

That has been the methodology of the Christian Church since that day in Athens in AD 51,when St. Paul; the very intelligent, epileptic lawyer from Tarsus, and one ofthe greatest Christian proselytizers; stood in the Acropolis of Athens, roderoughshod on the Athenian concept of the unknown God, to sell them his ownversion of it. At that encounter at the acropolis, they argued about arguments,but Paul exercised his most delicate craft masterfully. Unfortunately, theBible did not give us an unbiased account from the side of the Athenians.

Islam does not fare better in this regard. A glance into history would apprise you ofthis.

To make most of these illogical theologies persuasive to logical minds, who wouldnormally resist these cocktails of myths and borrowed tales, these religionscreated militant mercenaries out of their adherents, who would be ready at amoment’s notice, to lay down their lives to fight for what the priestcraft oftheir various persuasions tells them God’s will is, at any given point in time.The Christian church even went a step farther to make jingoistic militancy andthe ability to inflict unrestrained violence on adversaries in Jesus’ name asacrament. They called it confirmation. When confirmation couldn’t raise enoughsoldiers to crusade for that choice piece of real estate in Palestine calledthe Holy Land, the Holy See resorted to selling indulgences and other heavenlyreal estates, to raise cash to finance the war for the Holy Land. That wouldnot be the end of selling for sordid money, heavenly graces and other mythicalappurtenances that confers hope on the people in this vale of tears, while thepriestcraft indulged all their appetites here on earth. Islam took it equally anotch higher. It decriminalised murder, in as much as it was committed againstan infidel. A crime was cooked to religious palatability. Those who killed fortheir faith became virtuous. And those who died for it gained an unimpededaccess to paradise.

Suffice it to note that religion has effected some of the greatest whitewashings of crimein history. From temple prostitution to the anathematization of sex-one of themost beautiful acts of our natures, religion has most times been at theforefront of delegitimizing every natural delight that makes human lifepleasurable. In religion’s name, violence has been baptised and canonized;roguery and plunder whitewashed. In fact, impious neurosis of various shades andforms have been given religious blessings, and forced upon large swathes ofignorant humanity, as absolute truths at which they must bend their knees, inabsolute obeisance.

What about the priestcraft of religion?

History has not been kind on the institution of priestcraft of religion. The priestcraft ofvarious religions have been summaries of debauchery. Some priests have beenexperts in the darkest villainies known to history. Honesty and probity hasbeen foreign to many of them. Total impiety constituted the religion of many ofthem. Many of them preached virtue on pulpits, while all vices fought forsupremacy within them. Many worshipped avarice, ambition and debauchery, usingevery instrument of treachery, perfidy, flattery, ass-kissing, and so on. Inspite of great host of good and holy men and women of various religions, thereare many men and women of God, who preached moralities on pulpits andreligiously violated every single one of them immediately the light is turnedoff. Several priests were prominent patrons of irreverent circles. Many of themlie with infernal ease; spent monies skimmed off impoverished people on impiouspleasures; affect scandalous piety as respite from adultery; and have Bacchusas the only true god they worship.

Till date, in spite of contemporary catholic attempts at sublimating its violent past andpropensities; a departure engendered by the aggiornamento of the Second VaticanCouncil, which reached its apogees in John Paul II apologising to the wholeworld in 2000 for all catholic atrocities in history; imported theologies havealways spawned mercenaries for God since that day at the portals of the gardenat Gethsemane, when Simon Peter drew his sword to harvest an ear in defence ofhis master.

Almost all imported religious are guilty here. They have their soldiers of Christ;soldiers of the cross; God’s army, Hezbollah-Army of Allah, and so on. Militarydivisions or armies are never created to serve ice-creams. They are killingmachines. Throw religion into the mix, and the most incomprehensible motivationfor murder arises. With such armies massed on both sides of religiousdisagreements and conflicts in Nigeria, blood will continue to flow on suchfrontlines of war between Christians and Muslims like Jos, Nigeria. Suchconflicts will always have hideous results. ‘Holy thieves’ is not onlyoxymoronic or a conceptual monstrosity, thieves that pretend to holiness are inactual fact the most dangerous of crooks. This would tell you what happens whenmurderers in the most proximate potency, are offered religious reason topractice their trade.

8. At the Mercy of Alien Doctrines: The Example of ‘Hardship’ Allowance

Stealing is an ignoble vocation. But it is a very hard one. I am all for a guy who does thedirtiest job, getting seriously remunerated for his troubles. I mean: he isentitled to hardship allowance. But that job must not be criminal. It must be alegitimate, noble, productive and edifying occupation. A thief will never qualify for hardshipallowance in my consideration.

No ethical tradition or responsible disposition would ever justify that.

Paying a thief some special allowance to compensate him for his troubles of robbing us,empties productivity of meaning, and plunges society into the paths ofretrogression. No society has everadvanced, when its citizens are empowered and remunerated to prowl on the livesand property of their compatriots. No society subsists or survives on robbery.Remunerating robbery compromises social progress. And we would never subscribeto that.

Thievery is a base occupation. I can only consider some allowance for a thief; who reservesno other means to survive, outside petty stealing to forestall gastronomicemergency. This allowance would be to wean him off his disreputable occupation,and stabilize him enough to get back to positive employment. Apart from this, Iwonder how any sane mind would countenance “hardship allowance” from thecommunity treasury, for a monumental thief, who solemnly steals way beyond thelimits of his greedy elasticity. Iwonder how the people could keep quiet in timid acquiescence, as thieves stakeclaims to hardship allowance from the commonweal, for the most ‘difficult job’of robbing us with their pens.

If you cannot fathom this, you are in great company. I am also in the company of manynormal thinking people, who cannot fathom the Nigerian politician.

The introduction to this piece made it very clear. A country that importseverything including its ideologies is a country enslaved to the capriciouswhims of the sources of its imports. A country that produces nothing saverecycling expired ideologies; regurgitating failed policies; and canonizing hergeriatric crooks has nothing of substance to contribute to the march of humancivilization. That country deserves to lose its name; be swept intoforgetfulness by the ebbs of history, or allowed to disintegrate into itscomponent parts, to see if any productive renaissance could sprout out of suchdecay.

Nigeria is a case in point here!

We imported Western style democracy. Instead of edifying us and leading us to the fertileshores of development, it has denuded us of our humanity and nourished ourgreed and avarice. The western style democracy we imported protects neither ourlives nor our property. Our ancient African ways kept our society whole, helpedus preserve our environment and guaranteed the ecological integrity necessaryfor integral existence. But the one we imported was the robber-baron version,which canonizes only capital and decapitates men

To that end, even till today, the crudest version of dysfunctional politics thatcharacterized the medieval courts of Europe, and the corresponding sycophancythat it spawned as it ravaged and pushed Europe into the dark ages, areunfortunately the two most lucrative cottage industries in Nigeria ofcontemporary times.

These industries promise the greatest return of profits on investments. Godfathersinvest their money to buy office in a primeval version of political simony.Influences are traded, sold, and purchased with thuggery, assassinations,threats, inflammation of ethnic allegiances, treachery and an overabundance ofbackstabbing and perfidy. These two industries employ many otherwise intelligentminds and convert them into citadels of corruption; purchasable consciencesonly there to attend to the needs of their avarice.

To get to office, they are ready to sell their souls to the infernal powers. Herepolitical simony is the surest route to power. They kick, kill, bite and bribeto get into office. Once in office, instead of taking care of the business ofthe people, whose supposed mandate they enjoy, they spend their office,principally stuffing and satiating their greed with resources cornered andskimmed off the commonweal. Their second vocation is then settling all thecapricious matrices that bought or smoothened their ways to power. Little timeand consideration is dedicated to the people’s business. They people are neveran important consideration in such a scheme. They people are used as cosmeticslogans to hide the rotten metaphysic, which inspired and nourishes theirconcept and grasp of power. Power is for service, only if the god that desirestheir genuflection or service is their avarice, and every other minor deitythat panders to that.

To this end, the Nigerian politics has become an essential arena where greed marriesaudacious impunity. We have virtually no opposition party in parliament. Thisis because the ruling party equally rules the electoral umpire. To win anelection anywhere in the country, one must sell his soul to the ruling party.Many of the politicians have no convictions or ideologies of the kind ofpolitics they want to play or represent. All they want is power for its ownsake. And they march into the ruling party in droves. They are content ingetting into office. They are not content or concerned with achieving anythingof substance, while in office. They are clever in their rogueries. Nigerianshave been out-dribbled into keeping their eyes shut, while the ruling partyruns the affairs of the electoral umpire. And the electoral umpire allows onlythose who are marked with the signs of the ruling beast. I wonder how the beastwould ever allow credible elections, since even kids are suffused withnightmares since they got acquainted with the face of the Nigerian beast. Thebeast must then rule with the sceptre of iron, and give us scorpions andstones, whenever we ask for bread.

You need not go farther than looking at the quality of debates in all levels of ourlegislature in Nigeria; from the local councils; through the state houses of assemblyto the National assembly. The only debates in these houses that attractstrident and vociferous debate, sometimes conducted with fisticuffs is when itcomes to the salaries and perks of office of the members of parliament, theirbudgetary allocation; or the impeachment of a chief executive that refused tobribe them. Other than that, no legislation of substance that has the people asit centre has ever emanated from our senate or house of Reps. But these men arewomen are paid allowances in excess of what we as a country budget for theeducation of our children and posterity. It towers over what we budget toeradicate the artificial poverty that our politics and its internationalsupporters have plunged the majority of our people into. It transcends what webudget for agriculture and feeding of our population; it dwarfs what we budgetfor infrastructure development or in restoring the ecological integrity of theNiger Delta, which has remained a placard of our collective callousness.

These representatives collect sitting allowance for every sitting, even when they arenot present. It is a cool investment. You can stay in your house and sleep allday and your sitting allowance keeps on flowing into your account. I wonder howan employee, who plays truancy at work without adequate explanation, could keephis job although his employer is well aware of his antics. It is either thatthe employer is stupid, irresponsible or compromised. If not, the employeeshould have been thrown out long ago. If you watch sittings of the Nigeriansenate on TV, one is something repulsed by the lackadaisical approach of theSenators to what should be a very serious business. Empty seats stares you inthe face. You cannot but ask yourself, where the guy who is supposed to representyour interests seats to do that. He may be representing you by servicing hisphallic needs on top of one of his mistresses in a hotel room in Abuja; or hemay be busy junketing from one South American capital to the other, since thishas become their choice destination for money laundering since Europe andAmerica started trying to set an example with Ibori and Atiku.

The greatest insult to the Nigerian suffering masses, is that these guys who aredeluged with unmerited pleasures and perks of office, are in addition to that,skimming serious money off the Nigerian treasury as “HARDSHIP ALLOWANCE” fordoing simply NOTHING! Quote me: They do nothing!!!

They collect hardship allowance for riding air-conditioned cars, and a kilometrelong retinue of security, hangers on, and assistants, when Nigerians have noroads to drive their cars, or an efficient transportation system to cater totheir needs.

Many of these guys are conscienceless jobbers. Added to that is their lack of integrityand shamelessness. Many of the Senators have never introduced any bill in thesenate since they got in there, in spite of the extreme wastage of resources inmaintaining offices that many of them have never sat down in. Many of them havenever been to their constituencies except during election campaigns, to get totalk to the people whom they represent about their needs and problems. Yet,many go home with chunky funds for constituency projects, and accounts to noone about that, even though we have never seen many projects across theseconstituencies to justify these funds; and no one is asking questions aboutthese monies.

Yet we have the scandal called Hardship allowance!

It is simply remunerating robbery. We are paying our politicians for robbing us. Thatis Nigeria! And this explains why the country is not developing.